Flood shows Mother Nature isn’t always nice

Last week’s flood serves as an important reminder that Mother Nature isn’t always nurturing.


While most people are well aware of that fact – television and other media do a pretty good job of letting us know the damage hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, tsunamis, heat waves and ice storms cause – people in Portage County have had the luxury of avoiding nature’s fury a lot more often that most people elsewhere.

Tornadoes seem to breeze around the county, finding their way to Fond du Lac County instead; other weather phenomena seemingly don’t like Portage County either. My observations are just that – observations – but I can’t imagine many people will argue with me. This area somehow (knock on wood) repulses the truly bad things.

Just to the south and east of us, in Waushara County, where I worked for a decade at the Waushara Argus, once or twice a year part of my job required me to cover some sort of devastating weather event.

This included straight-line winds that took out entire forests and caused millions of dollars in property damage throughout a large chunk of the central portion of the county; a hail storm that destroyed hundreds of house roofs and automobiles in the Wautoma area; a fire that destroyed hundreds of acres in the town of Dakota; an ice storm that literally kept most people in their homes for several days, but not me (unfortunately) from going to work; and two different floods that closed Wautoma’s Main Street for days.

Not mentioned is the 1992 tornado that killed two people and leveled a large portion of Wautoma. I was still in high school at the time, and living in Berlin, but I witnessed the damage several days later when groups from my school went there to volunteer with the cleanup.

The two Wautoma floods occurred in consecutive years when torrential rains – one of them pouring more than nine inches on the city overnight – caused the normally gentle White River and one of its millponds to spill over their banks and into the town. Flood experts labeled them as 1,000-year floods, although getting them in back-to-back years made them seem more like yearly floods.

I’m going to knock on wood again, because I’ve rather enjoyed the fact Portage County has a good rapport with Mother Nature. While floods and other natural disasters can sell papers, it’s never fun having to see the devastation they can cause. I don’t want to see any of my Portage County brothers and sisters suffer because their home or property was located in an unfortunate spot hurt where nature unleashed its rage.

Judging by the good nature of many of the people I’ve talked to about the flood, including one family stranded from their home for several days because of road closings, people here have a lot of respect for nature. They know it’s not personal, and that it could have been a lot worse.

Making the situation better was the excellent response by local officials about the flood. Stevens Point Mayor Andrew Halverson, Portage County Executive Patty Dreier, Emergency Management Director Sandra Curtis and many others kept everybody well informed, took decisive actions to close roads when necessary and provided plenty of warnings, cautioning people to stay away from the raging waters of the flooded Wisconsin River.

On Thursday morning, well before the full impacts of the overnight rains were realized, reports came in about roads being washed out. I took a drive out to County Trunk C to get a photo of one of these washed-out roads. When I arrived on the scene, road closed signs were already installed, and for added safety, a pair of county workers in a truck were there to make sure nobody went around the sign, as some people may be inclined to do. Someone unknowingly may have had a lucky day because those guys were there to prevent them from doing something stupid, because anyone driving over the road would have most likely found themselves with a wrecked car.

Those two guys deserve a thank you, and since potential victims won’t realize they owe them one, I’m going to give one on their behalf. Thank you.

And thank you to all those who lessened the negative impact of the flood. While it’s impossible to stop Mother Nature when she wants to show her true power, it’s nice to know many people helped mute her a little bit.